Archbishop regrets PM's decision

April 4 2002

Prime Minister John Howard's decision to allow surplus IVF embryos to be used for stem cell research was regrettable, Sydney's Anglican Archbishop Peter Jensen said today.

After days of consultation with church leaders and scientists, Mr Howard today said the use of embryos for stem cell research would be permitted, but would be governed by carefully crafted regulations.

But Dr Jensen, who had compared stem cell research to human cloning experiments by wartime Nazi doctors, said the decision opened the door to future therapeutic cloning.

"My difficulty with the prime minister's step, I know he's taken it very, very carefully, but my difficulty with it is that we have just now gone through a door and that door opens up all sorts of other possibilities which today we're against," he told ABC Radio.

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He said the health benefits of stem cell research could have been achieved by other methods.

"We ought not to have gone down this path," Dr Jensen said.

But he said having taken the step, the government had to now be prepared to resist the next step, which would be an inevitable push by scientists and researchers to allow therapeutic cloning.